The 6 Most WTF Medical Procedures That Inexplicably Exist

Say, do you like modern medicine? Sure you do. There are accounts from the Dark Ages of doctors attempting to cure the "feeble-minded" by cutting a cross-shaped wound into their heads with razors, peeling the flesh back all the way down to the skull, then rubbing salt all over it to scare the demon out. And it worked, if the demon was life and the goal was to make that life stop. Which is to say, don't peel someone's skull skin off and salt the wound. That's really piss-poor medicine. But modern medicine is great -- it gives us pacemakers, insulin pumps, super awesome robot limbs, and dogs in wheelchairs.

For all the awesomeness medicine provides, it also has its disinfected fingers in a few weird pies that you never even knew existed. Stuff that, even if it is useful (and not all of it seems to be), it's certainly weird as shit. And that's an official medical diagnosis. The prognosis is comedy!

#6. Head Transplant

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Doctors can transplant all manner of body parts these days, from hearts to ears to dongs (probably). And now it seems like you can put heads on that list. Heads. Your head. Or someone else's head on your body, assuming your body is free and in need of a new head.

Up until now there were a few barriers in the way of a proper head transplant. The big hurdle, of course, is that you need a head, and so does everyone else. Got a bodiless head and a headless body? That's two dead guys. But say you have them on ice and they're still fresh and mostly free from freezer burn -- now what? Any morbid maniac with a needle and thread could technically sew those things together, but hey, you could sew a patch that says "Belieber 4 Life" onto your own scrotum -- it doesn't mean you should, and it doesn't mean you'll benefit from it in any way.

The big problem with a head transplant is making the body work after the head is attached. They've been sewing animal heads on new bodies all holus-bolus since the 1970s, but the resulting frankenpoodles were all paralyzed because reattaching the spinal cord is hard as shit to do. Or it used to be. Because thanks to research by the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, the problems with reattaching that spinal column have been overcome, and now we can all swap noggins!

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"I'm a donor. My finger, my butt, your nightmares."

OK, maybe it's not as simple as all of that, and the procedure hasn't been tested yet, but the science is there. The terrible, creepy science.

Say you're in an accident in some kind of industrial head separatoring machine like they use in the back of Walmart or whatever and oh shit, there goes you head. As is tradition, your body is turned to mulch and you're in a bit of a bind. Luckily, a guy across town was also in a head separatoring machine, but he went in upside down and his head is now a pudding. So you and him meet up at the hospital and a doctor puts you two crazy cats together. Now when you wake up, you have creepy new hands that you're afraid to pick your teeth with, and when you poop, it's probably not a color you're used to because those guts aren't yours. And your crotch is a whole new crotch that probably isn't pleasant to you because how can you like having new genitals? What if your new junk is bulky and weird? What if it smells funny? What if there's a mole on it? How will you ever handle having a new body?

If the new body heebie-jeebies don't get you, then taking a moment to think about tissue rejection ought to scare the shit out of your new ass. What if that body rejects your head? That's literally the most awful thing I can think of. Do you want your head going necrotic? It's your head!

#5. Toebesity

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Look at the title of this entry. Look at that word, that preposterous portmanteau. Portmantoe. Portly Man's Toe. Good God. Toebesity is the shameful moniker made up by someone in the cosmetic surgery racket to describe fat toes, which is apparently a thing. An honest to goodness thing.

Due to the fear of what your feet may look like in sandals and other footwear that relies heavily on foot nudity, people began going to surgeons and asking for some manner of invasive, slicey way to slim their toes down. This wasn't even a thing a surgeon dreamed up, this was a recurring request from vapid, shallow, awful humans that eventually inspired surgeons to shrug and start shaving the fat-ass toes of rich people.

The surgery can cost around $2,500, and it consists of the removal of fat and bone to make the toe smaller. There are legit medical reasons for doing this sometimes, things like hammertoe, but there's a larger market for people who just want their feet to look better and are actually, non-jokingly self-conscious about the size of their toes. A better surgery for people like this would be to have a doctor remove the excess asshole tissue that is clearly making them into giant assholes, but that may be against some kind of Hippocratic oath.

#4. Eyelash Transplants

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Your eyelashes exist solely to keep things like grit and bugs and transplanted dongs out of your eyes. They're like a really weak-ass security system easily overcome by anything capable of forward momentum. Still, if we didn't have them, our eyes would be gooey, muddy, dust-laden messes all the time, so it's pretty useful to keep them around.

While you and I flaunt our eyelashes like pompously arrogant lash sultans of old, some poor folks have no lashes, or suffer conditions that cause them to fall or even be pulled out (because that's really a thing, and it's sadder than a puppy with its leg in a sling). And, surprising to no one, some people are just really vain and want more lash than genetics offered them at birth. The solution to these problems is eyelash transplant surgery.

"Ryan Seacrest did this to me. For no reason."

You'll notice right away that your eyelashes are a bit of a niche product on your body. You don't really have a lot of other hairs that are similar, barring those few of us who engage in the classical art of pube topiary. And even then, you don't want pubes for eyelashes because you'd just end up looking like a disgraceful sponge with a well-worn scrubby side and pupils.

The actual procedure for lash transplantation is to remove hairs from the back of your head and sew them into your eyelids. So your new lashes are head hairs, which means they keep growing. If you let them, they'll grow about as long as the hair on your head normally grows, which is why you need to trim your new transplants once a week after getting them. Doesn't that sound fun?

I like the idea of someone growing preposterously long, limp eyelashes that look like Cher's hair in the '70s, like weird curtains for their eyes that get tangled and knotted, because that kind of thing amuses me. I also assume that your eye crud that forms every morning has the potential to get all caked and nasty in your extra-long lashes, making you look diseased and uncomfortable to be around first thing in the morning.